could understand
the people on the stage singing and dancing and performing gymnastic
feats. He not only understood but intensely enjoyed an artist who
imitated cocks crowing and pigs squeaking. But the people who pretended
that they were somebody else, and that the painted picture behind
them was real, bewildered him. In his presence I realized how very
sophisticated the natural man has to become before the conventions
of the theatre can be easily acceptable, or the purpose of the drama
obvious to him.

Well, from the moment when the routine of leave for our soldiers was
established, such novices, accompanied by damsels (called flappers)
often as innocent as themselves, crowded the theatres to the doors. It
was hardly possible at first to find stuff crude enough to nurse them
on. The best music-hall comedians ransacked their memories for the
oldest quips and the most childish antics to avoid carrying the military
spectators out of their depth. I believe that this was a mistake as far
as the novices were concerned. Shakespeare, or the dramatized histories
of George Barnwell, Maria Martin, or the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,
would probably have been quite popular with them. But the novices were
only a minority after all. The cultivated soldier, who in time of peace
would look at nothing theatrical except the most advanced postIbsen
plays in the most artistic settings, found himself, to his own
astonishment, thirsting for silly jokes, dances, and brainlessly
sensuous exhibitions of pretty girls. The author of some of the most
grimly serious plays of our time told me that after enduring the
trenches for months without a glimpse of the female of his species, it
gave him an entirely innocent but delightful pleasure merely to see
a flapper. The reaction from the battle-field produced a condition of
hyperaesthesia in which all the theatrical values were altered. Trivial
things gained intensity and stale things novelty. The actor, instead of
having to coax his audiences out of the boredom which had driven them to
the theatre in an ill humor to seek some sort of distraction, had only
to exploit the bliss of smiling men who were no longer under fire and
under military discipline, but actually clean and comfortable and in a
mood to be pleased with anything and everything that a bevy of pretty
girls and a funny man, or even a bevy of girls pretending to be pretty
and a man pretending to be funny, could do for them.

Then could